Production Work Report 2

Unfortunately, I’ve been struggling with health problems with myself and family the last two weeks and was not able to get as much done with as I wanted to on my children's book. Thankfully after the work I’ve done the last two weeks (aka what you’ll see in this report) all I have to focus on now is illustrations! So I’ll really be making headway the next two weeks knocking pages out!

Choosing Fonts

Dyslexia/Color Blind Friendly

As part of my research for the week, I looked at studies on what fonts are best for children's books, especially which ones are the most accessible.

I first looked at what fonts are the easiest to read for people with dyslexia. According to the British Dyslexia Association, "sans serif fonts, such as Arial and Comic Sans; alternatives include Verdana, Tahoma, Century Gothic, Trebuchet, Calibri, Open Sans." are the best. Additionally, the font size should be at least 12-14 points or bigger.

For color some suggestions were:

• Use single colour backgrounds. Avoid background patterns or pictures and distracting surrounds.

• Use sufficient contrast levels between background and text.

I looked up colors to avoid for color blindness as well, but this website also summed up to simply avoid green and red/pink.

This helpful article was Creating a dyslexia friendly workplace.

Another helpful study was Good Fonts for Dyslexia – An Experimental Study by Dyslexia the Gift Blog. This study says sans serif (Verdana, Garamond, Helvetica, Computer Modern Unicode, monospaced (Courier), and roman fonts (Arial, Times, Myriad) help dyslexic readers.

Fonts for Children's Books

I next looked up the most common fonts used in children's books and also what was proven to be the best fonts for children's books. Indie Kids Books was a great resource.

The article "What fonts for children's books?" listed:

SERIF fonts: Myriad Pro, Georgia, Plantin Infants, Alegreya, Garamond Pro, Crimson, Baskerville Old Face, Century Schoolbook.

NON-Serif fonts: Helvetica, Gill Sans, Quicksand, Century Gothic, Avenir Next, Lato.

Decision

To make a choice for the font I compared the lists of dyslexic friendly and common children's books fonts. Fonts included in both groups were Myriad Pro, Garamond, Helvetica and Gills Sans.

After looking at all the fonts, I prefer Helvetica and Gills Sans. When I'm putting the story text with my illustrations I'll make the final decision!

Final Writing Draft

The writing has been the most difficult part for me in the project (so far!). Thankfully, as long as I have a draft similar to the amount of words on each page that the final will have, I can start on the illustrations and placement on where the text will be on each page.

I have two really talented friends who are amazing writers. I'm meeting with them soon and they are going to help me further clean up the draft as well! The draft should be done in the next few days and I'll post it here.